Language Biogrpahy

Language Biography

What is a Language Biography?

A Language biography is the linguistic history of a multilingual individual. The Council of Europe states that language biographies are mostly used to reflect or assist one’s linguistic and learning process and progress (n.d.). It is an activity that aims to promote plurilingualism. Likewise, it helps students reflect on their language learning skills by providing them with different tools for self-assessment (Little, D, Hodel, H-P, Kohonen, V, Meijer, D, Perclová, R, 2017, p.10). For example, let’s take a look at my own language biography:

I was born and raised in a small town near Girona (Catalonia, Spain). My family speaks Catalan on a daily basis, which is the L1 I grew up with. Once I started nursery education, I was introduced to Spanish, the second official language in Catalonia. During my nursery and primary years, I began taking English classes in language academies for kids. English, Catalan, and Spanish are mandatory subjects during primary, secondary, and high school education. Around the age of 14 or 15, when I was still in secondary school, I started studying Latin and German, as I have always been interested in learning new and different languages. Though during my last two years of high school I kept studying Latin and even added Greek, I cannot speak or understand the language, but I can read it at a basic level. During my last two years of high school, I studied French, but once I finished my high school degree, I never went back to the French language. I continued studying German and English until I finished college around the age of 21 years old. Finally, I started learning Korean, as I am very interested in Korean culture.

Currently, I feel very confident in Catalan, Spanish, and English. Though I can understand a certain level of both German and Korean, I do not feel confident speaking them, especially the Germanic language. Finally, French is a language I can understand since I have studied it for two years, and it is very similar to my mother tongue language. In the short future, I would love to learn Thai and continue improving my Korean skills, as I want to travel to those countries to enjoy their culture, which is very different from mine!

 What are some Language Biography activities we can make students perform in our classes?

Now, let’s talk a bit about how can we implement this type of language acquisition activity. For pre-primary and primary school students, we could use a visualizing repertoire. A visualizing repertoire is a type of language biography that is easy and interesting for younger students, as it involves posters and drawings. Visualizing activities with younger kids is usually a bonus point, as kids love coloring and drawing!

One main idea would be to have a human body template and make students draw with different colors the relationship they have with different languages. For example: 

Image retrieved from: Council of Europe (ECML/CELV). (n.d.). Visualizing language repertoires | Examples. Retrieved from: https://maledive.ecml.at/Home/Examples/tabid/3636/language/en-GB/Default.aspx. 

The main idea would be to ask students to paint how they feel about the languages they know in different colors.

- Paint in red the languages you know

- Paint in green the languages you understand but find difficult to speak.

- Paint in blue the languages you want to learn 

- Paint in yellow the languages you feel more confident speaking in.

Then, students have to present their language biography to other students. When presenting, they ought to answer some of these questions:

- Why and how do you know these languages?

- How did you learn these languages?

- Why do you want to learn these languages?

This activity can be done with many templates (a human body, a tree, a flower, etc.). 

For older primary students or secondary students, what might be more adequate could be a language biography poster or video. I would recommend this activity to classes with multilingual children or students with different backgrounds. A class with a lot of diversity, so they can talk about the languages they already master or are mastering on a daily or frequent basis. However, it can still be done in non-diverse classes, as students can talk about the languages they know and would like to start studying.

An idea could be to talk a little bit about their family backgrounds. However, some families are not too keen on this topic, so it is always better to focus on the languages themselves. Students can either create a video talking about it or create a small poster similar to the one attached below. Usually, activities that integrate a CALL tool tend to be a plus for older students, as they spend most of their time surrounded by technology.

Image retrieved from: Humbert, B. (2020, September 20). ALL: Language biography. Zoom English. Retrieved from: http://zoomenglish.blogspot.com/2020/09/all-language-biography.html https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=http%3A%2F%2Fzoomenglish.blogspot.com%2F2020 

The goal of this activity is for students to introduce their language repertoire and what languages they would like to pick up in the future. Likewise, it helps students focus on how they learn, and see the process and progress they have or are experiencing with different languages and cultures. Likewise, these activities tend to be very helpful for students to know a bit more about their peers, find similarities between them and learn from each other. Another great idea could be to hang them in class to represent the diversity of languages that create that group of students.

Finally, another idea could be for students to write a song about the languages they speak. This can be a bit trickier than students would have to rhyme words, follow some kind of melody… But overall, it can be a nice activity for students to do in groups and have fun while also integrating other modalities. 

Remember that it is important to divide the class between pre-tasks, task-preparation task-realization, and post-task. We have already established some task-realization activities. What pre-tasks could we do for students to warm up for these activities? Well, it will all depend on the main task chosen, but a good idea would be to listen to a song that has different languages on it, create some kind of information-gathering activity for the students, prepare some opinion-sharing activity where students can talk about different cities and countries they have traveled to… There are many options! For the post-task activities, as previously stated, students could do an information-gathering activity where they are supposed to find people with the most similarities with them (people that speak the same language, have the same language goals, etc.). And finally, as one of my classmates, Sara, shared with us in a Methods for Teaching English As a Foreign Language class, students could learn a few words in the different class languages. 

To create a perfect class structure, it is important to first decide on the main task activity and then create the different activities that will lead to it and finish the class. Likewise, it is very important to set specific goals and objectives that are of interest to the students and fit their age and level. Language biographies are for anyone, we just have to choose the adequate way of performing them, according to our students' interests and needs.

References used on this entry:

Council of Europe. (n.d.). The Language Biography. European Language Portfolio (ELP). https://www.coe.int/en/web/portfolio/the-language-biography 

Little, D, Hodel, H-P, Kohonen, V, Meijer, D, Perclová, R. (2017, July). Training teachers to use the European Language Portfolio. The Council of Europe. https://e-uic.uic.es/pluginfile.php/1084556/mod_resource/content/1/Training_teachers_to_use_the_European_Language_Por.pdf